Shaping Up

Motivation

My little brother has always held an interest in drawing and has recently decided to take his hobby to the next level by trying his hand at 2D animation with his friends. Seeing his enthusiasm for drawing when he talks to me about how his progress is going has given me a desire to try and learn how to draw myself. Though there are many things to learn that could be categorized as drawing, I wish to focus particularly on drawing human anatomy. This involves drawing proper proportions for the different sections of the body (legs, torso, arms, etc.) as well as learning how to draw a proper face, and the dreaded hands.

Just YouTube It

For my first week, the first few days were spent researching how to draw and where to start on Google and Youtube. A large portion of that time was spent viewing different videos which included 30 day drawing challenges such as this video by “Marc Brunet” where the goal was to get the audience to get used to commonly used drawing principles by spending 10-30 minutes a day drawing a series of increasingly complex prompts for 30 days. The other type of videos I watched took a look at long-term schedules for learning such as this video by “Draw Like a Sir” where it showed a linear plan of building the fundamentals and slowly adding to them over time. I will be modelling most of my progress through the steps found in Draw Like a Sir’s video as I can measure how far along the path I progress during my time in this class, and it will feel nice seeing a more physical progression chart to measure the progress with.

What I Found

The most common thing I found for beginners starting out was two main points: get used to drawing consistent and smooth lines, and draw lots of shapes. It didn’t matter what video I watched, being able to draw consistent and smooth shapes was always stressed as being vitally important as every drawing could be broken down into many simple shapes. So during the week, I spent 30 minutes a day drawing shapes, both 2D and 3D, while focusing on making the lines as clean and smooth as possible. This image is one such paper that I ended up with (note that normally one page would be covered with one type of shape but I drew this with taking a picture of it in mind). On this page is vertical lines, horizontal lines, and a lot of squares, triangles, and circles as well as their 3D counterparts. I found squares the easiest, and circles the hardest to get consistently throughout the exercises, so I will focus more effort on improving my circles in future weeks.

Small Aside

Before I started my research I didn’t know what my practice schedule would look like so I decided to draw a hand as a baseline for fun. This took around 20 minutes and a lot of staring at my own hand. After the week was over I decided to take another look at it to see if I noticed anything I could improve on based on my research and I noticed how the lines I used are not smooth but instead made of many smaller lines that make the hand look more jagged and fuzzy. While I feel it looks fine here, the research I did often stressed that this habit will only make things harder for me the more complicated and detailed the drawings become, especially when trying to create a more smooth final version of the drawing. I also noticed how the proportions are off, with the thumb being much longer than each of the fingers. Though small, it was nice that I could already see how the research I was doing was pointing out bad habits that I have so that I can get rid of them at the start of my learning experience rather than near the end.